Thread by @usacsmret

Report: U.S. Incarceration Falls to 20-Year Low via @freebeacon freebeacon.com/issues/report-…

The share of the adult population in prison has fallen to its lowest point since 1997, a new report released Thursday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows.

Thursday's report provides information on the state of the nation's prison system in 2017, with data on both the federal system (which accounted in that year for about 12 percent of all incarcerated) and the prisons of the 50 states.

The U.S. prison system has been the subject of major dispute in recent years, with left-wing politicians and Emmy-winning documentaries decrying it as racist and overstuffed with low-level, non-violent drug offenders.

The new BJS report, however, paints a picture of a system that is shrinking, growing more racially equitable, and which mostly detains serious, violent offenders, not petty drug users.

Beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate rose steadily for some three decades. This was in large part in response to the steadily rising crime rates of that same period, which crested in the early 1990s and have fallen more-or-less continuously since then.

The incarceration rate peaked in 2007, at about 670 inmates per 100,000 American adults. As of the most recent data, it has fallen by about 15 percent, to 568 inmates per 100,000. Much of that decline has been among the black, and to a lesser extent Hispanic, prison populations.

In absolute terms the gap between the number of black and white inmates has been shrinking. This phenomenon is itself an artifact of racial disparities in arrest rates. The underlying causes are the subject of much debate but almost certainly tied to socioeconomic inequity.

Per capita, the black incarceration rate has fallen by nearly 32 percent since 2007, the equivalent of a drop of more than 700 prisoners per 100,000 black adults. The white rate, by contrast, has fallen about 19 percent, a decline of 54 prisoners per 100,000 white adults.

The new BJS report provides valuable insight on what kind of criminals, exactly, are being imprisoned. Ocasio-Cortez's vivid image notwithstanding, it confirms the long-standing finding that most people in the United States are incarcerated for serious, often violent offenses.

While drug offenses make up about 45 percent of incarcerees in the Federal prison system (which in turn accounts for 12 percent of the nation's prison population), essentially all of these are detained for drug trafficking.

At the state level, meanwhile, the majority of offenders are convicted of violent crimes. In fact, the number of drug offenders in state prisons fell between 2007 and 2017, while the number of violent offenders actually rose slightly.

What is more, these figures are almost certainly an undercount of the true number of people incarcerated for violent crime. More than 90 percent of cases end in plea bargains, and otherwise violent criminals frequently plea-down to non-violent offenses.

This means, as criminologist John F. Pfaff noted, "the 15% there for possession is an over-estimate and the 20% in for violence is an under-estimate."

Following a federal court order finding that the state's prisons were dangerously overcrowded, in 2011 California implemented a project called Public Safety Realignment. Realignment moved low-level, non-violent offenders out of prisons and into local jails.

The BJS does not provide state-level data on jail populations, but the nationwide convicted jail population fell between 2007 and 2017.

In other words, a single state's major policy shift explains much of the incarceration drop. Still, other states' policies did move the needle—each of New York, Michigan, and Texas net released around 10,000 prisoners between 2007 and 2017.

The total picture the BJS report paints of the U.S. prison system departs substantially from that frequently depicted in the mainstream media. Although still quite large, the prison population has been shrinking for a decade

Racial disparities in incarceration are closing; and the lion's share of incarcerees that remain are detained for serious, often violent offenses, not for possessing a dime-bag of marijuana.